The Internet has continued to grow from an information sharing tool for the government and universities to a commercially viable E-commerce marketplace used by a significant portion of society. Not only are people able to purchase products online, but they are also able to purchase services. Thus, a service can be obtained by engaging an independent service provider without requiring the addition of an employee. For example, if a company wants to engage a programmer to design a web site for them, the company does not simply hold office interviews and hire someone. Instead, certain web sites provide users with the ability to post their expertise and companies with the ability to post jobs that need to be performed. One leading example of such a website is elance.com. Depending on the site, users and companies form an agreement where one provides a service and the other pays for and receives the result of that service (e.g. a completed web site). ELANCE is a registered trademark of Elance, Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.
As with most web sites, this site and competitive sites that provide service buyers and service providers a meeting ground, contain a significant amount of data. The ability to organize the data properly can impact user satisfaction. For example, a site that lists service providers alphabetically by name would present a significant disadvantage for someone with a name towards the end of the alphabet such as Zeb Zimmerman. If the site only had 5 service providers, the problem would be minimal. However, for sites which have many hundreds or thousands of service providers, a better method of listing the service providers is needed.
Some methods have been implemented to sort the data and provide it in a more useful manner to users. U.S. Pat. No. 6,871,181 to Kansal teaches a method for assessing, scoring, ranking and rating technology vendors for the purpose of comparing vendor bids on a project. A score or ranking is developed for each of the vendors based upon the vendor's historical reliability as well as normalizing the vendor's ranking with respect to the other vendors for the purpose of determining the appropriate vendor. U.S. Patent App. No. 2006/0212359 to Hudgeon teaches ratings based on performance attributes such as service quality, timeliness and cost. Sites such as rentacoder.com and guru.com also use ratings which organize service providers. Rentacoder.com uses an equation which sums the cost of each job times the adjusted rating of each job minus each missed status report value. Guru.com ranks users by category and then based on feedback and money earned.
While the ranking schemes above are helpful in organizing data related to service providers on web sites, there are shortcomings which need to be addressed.